Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Wind energy has been collected during much of human civilization and the most ubiquitous device has been, and continues to be, the windmill. Modern fluid dynamics based design has yielded a vast array of wind turbine designs, however conventional wind turbines are not practical for everyday use in homes and buildings as they are large, cumbersome, may pose safety risks, and thus need to be installed in special environments.
There has also been considerable effort expended in the use of the piezoelectric effect to produce more elegant, compact, and integrated wind energy harvesting. The piezoelectric effect (solid state potential changes that are linearly proportional to applied stress) is observed in ferroelectric ceramics and polymers and is relatively inefficient since it is a cooperative condensed matter phenomenon. Proliferation of piezoelectric wind harvesting devices over a large scale may be impractical due to the intricate micromechanical nature of most conceivable structures.
The present disclosure appreciates that exterior surfaces of building structures such as homes, walls, buildings, bridges and dams, are constantly exposed to wind, however, most of the kinetic energy of wind impacting the structures is retained in the air stream since it is elastically scattered.